San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Classical: Pandemicera project inspired by Italian literature.
In “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century literary compilation, a group of 10 young Florentines flee their plagueridden hometown and set up camp in a villa outside the city. While they shelter in place, they’re safe from the depredations of the disease but starved for entertainment.
Sound like a familiar predicament?
Boccaccio’s characters wind up passing the time by telling each other stories — each one spinning a nightly tale over 10 nights, for a grand total of 100 yarns — but their solution transfers just as well to other art forms, including music. Or so it seemed to David Plylar, the Library of Congress’ senior music specialist and one of the producers of its concert series.
“I’m a composer, and I’ve always wanted to do a piece based on ‘The Decameron,’ ” he said during a recent phone interview. “But it never seemed like the right time. So instead, we set up a kind of microcommissioning project.”
Over the course of April, as the extent and severity of the COVID19 pandemic began to sink in, Plylar extended invitations to 10 new music performers who in turn recommended 10 composers, and each pair created and recorded a short musical work to be viewed online.
Now the results of the undertaking, simply and elegantly dubbed “The Boccaccio Project,” are in, and they’ve been rolling out daily — in an obvious nod to the original inspiration — at the Library of Congress website. They bear eloquent testimony to the range of possibilities within this restricted form.
The music is by turns lushly expressive and starkly conceptual. Some performers take a bow and deliver their work straight from their home practice room; others go allout with visual and electronic effects. Each represents a distinctive response to the current circumstances.
And precisely because of those circumstances, nobody involved had much room to maneuver. Composers were given two weeks to write a piece lasting one to three minutes, and the performers got another two weeks to send in their performance video.
“That’s a great way to work with composers,” said Berkeley composer Luciano Chessa, one of the contributors. “The turnaround time was very tight, but they said the piece could be as short as one minute. So that’s not too bad, and then once you start writing ...”
Chessa’s piece, “1462 Willard St.,” was written for violist Charlton Lee of San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet, and it grew directly out of the experience of quarantine. In the middle of a semester spent teaching in New York, the composer returned to the Bay Area in March for what was supposed to be a quick oneweek visit.
Instead, Chessa found himself trapped by the city’s shelterinplace order. He wound up spending two months in the Cole Valley apartment whose address is memorialized in his piece’s title.
“We didn’t have any information about the spread of the disease,” he recalled. “Were we going to be in lockdown forever? It all felt very scary.”
Out of that experience grew a tiny musicaltheatrical fable. At the beginning of the piece, two pieces of twine are wrapped around the viola’s two lowest strings and attached to an anchoring structure. The performer then walks slowly away from the anchor, allowing the twine to rub against the strings in counterpoint to the main melody; when the performer finally gets out of range of the twine, the melody stands on its own.
“The piece was supposed to be about the trajectory from constraint to freedom,” Chessa explained. “When the twine finally runs out, the violist is free. But of course that’s when the memory of constraint enters, so he’s really not so free after all.”
In a Zoom call from his home in the Outer Richmond, Lee confirmed that the transition in the piece is more ambiguous than it seems.
“For Luciano, the twine represents a constriction, and once it’s gone the melody can sing a little more freely,” he said. “But it also marks the moment when the whole responsibility for the music shifts to me.”
Writing for a single instrument means different things, of course, depending on the instrument in question. Music for piano — such as Damien Sneed’s “Sequestered Thoughts,” which gets a thrillingly robust rendition by pianist Jeremy Jordan — can be as fullthroated and weighty as you wish.
Writing for a singleline instrument such as an oboe or a flute narrows the focus (although Allison LogginsHull’s achingly beautiful “Have and Hold” nimbly expands the field by having flutist Nathalie Joachim sing, and adding a layer of electronic sounds).
“There’s an intimacy about the whole thing,” says cellist Kathryn Bates of the Del Sol, for whom the project commissioned Miya Masaoka’s emotionally urgent solo “Intuit (a way to stay in this world).”
“It’s very different from the usual performance setup. It’s just one composer, one performer, and you as the one listener, even if everyone is listening simultaneously in their own homes.”
For Plylar, “The Boccaccio Project” represents a logical outgrowth of the Library of Congress’ longstanding mission of commissioning and curating new musical work, especially now that its renowned concert series has gone dark. It’s a history that dates to 1925 and encompasses some 600 commissions. He says the library is also continuing its tradition of securing and archiving the musical manuscripts of any piece it commissions, adding it to the collection of about 25 million print items.
“Not all of these are handwritten manuscripts nowadays,” he says, “because so many composers now use notation software. But we also take sketches and other preparatory material, which gives you a wonderful snapshot of how the composer works.”
Bates suggests that the snapshot extends even further, to capture a salient moment in history and the ways artists are reacting to it.
“I think these pieces are kind of looking toward a new format, focused on one idea and the simplicity of a solo instrument. And it’s not unique to the Library of Congress — there’s a glut of solo music, because that’s all that people can do right now,” Bates says.
“These pieces are beautiful and unique. Even once the pandemic is over I think they’ll carry a memory of what it was like to be alive during this time.”